Adobe has fired back against Apple’s recent ban on building iPhone apps via Flash. And this time, Adobe’s not pulling any of punches.
In a recent blog post on The Flash Blog, Adobe Platform Evangelist Lee Brimelow goes on the offensive for seven paragraphs, ripping into Apple’s recent change to its iPhone Developer Program License Agreement that only allows for applications to be written in Objective-C, C, C++ or Javascript and executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine. In fact, the post was so strong that Adobe asked Brimelow to delete a segment.
Here’s a piece of that blog post:
“This has nothing to do whatsoever with bringing the Flash player to Apple’s devices. That is a separate discussion entirely. What they are saying is that they won’t allow applications onto their marketplace solely because of what language was originally used to create them. This is a frightening move that has no rational defense other than wanting tyrannical control over developers and more importantly, wanting to use developers as pawns in their crusade against Adobe. This does not just affect Adobe but also other technologies like Unity3D.”
While it’s unlikely that Brimelow speaks for the entire company, it is still a very powerful attack on Apple. It’s a change in tone from just a month ago, when Adobe told us in an interview that it did not believe there was a battle between Apple and Adobe.
However, it’s the last paragraph that is the most striking, although Brimelow makes it clear that he’s speaking as his own man, not as a representative of Adobe:
“Now let me put aside my role as an official representative of Adobe for a moment as I would look to make it clear what is going through my mind at the moment. Go screw yourself Apple.”
Apple has essentially neutered the core feature of Adobe CS5, which is launching in less than a week, so we can understand why Adobe’s team is incredibly upset. We also understand the logic behind why Apple made this change. That why we believe this war is going to escalate, as neither side is going to back down.